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Rabble Rouser

How do you encourage non-liberal students to pursue careers in the social sciences? It is simple. Stop being hostile to them and their ideas. What a shock. If one creates an environment safe and supportive for all students, regardless of their politics, non-left students become interested in psychology.

The scientific pushback to the distorting effects of an overwhelmingly leftwing professorhood is gaining momentum. This entry provides links to resources that have scientifically documented the nature and extent of the problem, and have begun proposing remedies.

Most stereotypes that have been scientifically studied are more accurate than nearly all scientific hypotheses in social psychology. Liberals love to rail against how supposedly anti-scientific conservatives are. Why, then, are liberals so impervious to the data?

Social scientists routinely declare stereotypes to be inaccurate without citing a SHRED of data -- a single empirical study -- that has assessed the accuracy of stereotypes. This entry:
1. Documents this odd phenomenon; 2. Objects to it; and 2. Seeks to understand it as a manifestation of leftwing political biases.

This post introduces a new series of blogs on Political Bias. My previous series focused primarily on personal experiences of hostility. In contrast, this series will focus on DATA that bears on political discrimination in social psychology, and on how conventional "wisdom" is routinely distorted in ways that reflect and seem to "justify" left wing worldviews.

A commenter recently asked, "Why is there so little research on stereotypes of Jews?" I do not know for sure, but I suspect that the answer includes how leftwing political biases influence the questions scientists ask.

We performed a study showing that liberals were more biased in their perceptions of science than were conservatives. We could not get this published. When we removed all mention of liberals being more biased than conservatives, the paper was published.

Psychological research is sometimes, but not always, highly credible. Some quick guidelines are provided for use in figuring out when to take psychological research, and claims based on that research, seriously.

Scientific studies and scientists' claims should be treated with extreme skepticism, especially in psychology, until they have been demonstrated and replicated by multiple independent teams of researchers, repeatedly, and with large samples.

Evidence is accumulating that conservatives are in greater denial, or, at least, less in touch with, scientific facts than are liberals. It is just that, in contrast to liberal accusations that conservatives are anti-scientific, the ideological differences in denial or out of touchedness are not very large.

Many social science perspectives on stereotypes are exaggerated, inaccurate, rigidly resistant to change in the face of relentless disconfirming evidence, and maintain their conclusions by virtue of a very selective focus on studies and findings that confirm the a priori belief in the irrationality and badness of stereotypes.

Psychologists who claim that stereotypes are inaccurate are either ignorant of the data, blinded by their politics, or both. Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest relationships in all of psychology, and stereotypes are more accurate than most psychological hypotheses.

A recent NYTimes editorial by an economics graduate student at Harvard reached conclusions about racism that were entirely unjustified by his own and others' data. That type of overstated and unjustified claim: 1. Pervades the social sciences; 2. May often reflect political blinders that have no place in "science."

About Rabble Rouser

I launched this blog primarily to address issues surrounding flaws, biases, and distortions involved in research in social psychology, psychology, and the social sciences, and, secondarily, to bring well-established principles of social psychology to bear on real world issues.